Niece bees

As in the past few years around this time (see last year's entry), my sister came to visit with one of her children. This time it was Emily who came to pack up the bees - only it was too warm to celotex them already; besides, I still felt they needed to build up more stores.

The contact feeder uncontacted

Instead of wrapping the bees up, we therefore opened them up to get a good view of what's going on. Emily was fearless amid the bees, who were, if truth be told, very calm and relaxed. Removing the feeder was a slight challenge as always, as the bees waxed it to the frames (funny that they never propolize the contact feeder to the frames), but not really hard. At risk of sounding like a broken record: the bees had not taken a lot of the syrup, though surely foraging can't be that good (we did see two bees with full pollen baskets). Refilled the feeder for their final feed and aim to take it off in two weeks' time, which will hopefully give the bees enough time to store all they need or want.

To get an idea of their stores, I decided to do a full hive inspection. I also wanted to see how much the queen was laying. Luckily by this time the weather had hugely improved and the bees seemed to be enjoying the sunshine. As relatively easy as it had been to remove the feeder, it was almost impossible to take the frames out of the brood box: the bees had stuck them all down so thoroughly that the dummy board was in danger of splitting rather than coming out. In the end I managed, but only just. Will have to give the frames a proper clean-up come spring.

Checking the laying pattern

As to be expected, most frames were full or almost full with stores, though the bottoms of many frames were still bare. Only two frames had brood on them, showing a much reduced activity by the queen, who we didn't see, as Her Royal Beeness was hiding in the shadows.

Before putting the feeder back on the frames, Emily smoked the bees to make sure I wouldn't squash any (smoke makes the bees run and hide).

After having closed up the hive again, I installed a mouseguard. Although the weather is still warm, it is bound to change soon and as I don't want any mice thinking the Moon is a perfect place to spend their winter holidays. Now they can't get in, so won't.

Putting the feeder back on

No entry sign for mice